Crazy Person Ranks Every Single Star Trek Episode (Almost 700!)

We love lists as much as anyone, but this is pure madness. Freelance writer Jordan Hoffman, who is primarily a film reviewer for publications such as New York Daily News and The Guardian, took Trekkie to a whole new level when he compiled a comprehensive ranking of all 695 episodes of Star Trek, complete with his own subjective justifications for each one.

A lifelong Star Trek fan, he introduces his list as follows: "There are an infinite amount of parallel universes but one thing remains constant: Star Trek is THE franchise. There's nothing with its hooks in deeper in the (enormous, terrifying) minds of the true nerd. There may be more episodes of Doctor Who. There may be more action figures from Star Wars. But for deep-cut hardcore dweebdom, Roddenberry's Wagon Train to the Stars has no competish."

You can read this Indiewire interview for his very complex explanation of how long this project took him, but the Cliffnotes version is that watching all the episodes in order took years (a friend told him, "I've never known you when you weren't watching an episode of 'Star Trek' each night"), while the blurbs took four full business days.

Ignore the fact that it appears in Playboy and focus on the quality of the writing, which is as passionate and snarky as you'd expect. For example, the lowest-ranked episode, "Shades of Gray," got this justification: "A clips episode? What is this, The Partridge Family? An embarrassment. Don't give me excuses about a writer's strike, this is television sewage."